Only 16 miles from the center of London, in Downe, is Charles Darwin's
home, Down House, now under the management of
English Heritage.

His study,
where he did most of his writing and microscope work, has
been recreated from photographs. His "Sand Walk" for his daily
walks and "thinking time" is open, out in the back of the large
lawn and grounds.

I'm starting this little tour at Darwin's home, sitting at a park bench
under a magnificent oak tree that dates back to Darwin's time here. Five years
after returning from the voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin and his
young family moved from central London to a pleasant country home about 16
miles to the southeast, near the village of Downe. He lived here forty years
until his death in 1882. No more voyages around the world, not even trips to
the Continent, but Darwin had correspondents everywhere, and sometimes they
showed up at his door.

And it was here at Down House that he raised pigeons, studied earthworms,
and dissected barnacles. Here he sat, pen in hand, and wrote out his books
that provided so much of our modern understanding of how nature came to be the
way it is. But only ten years ago, a scientific pilgrimage to Darwin's country
home was remarkably difficult, unless you got directions from someone who had
been here before. Only the most detailed guidebooks had a mention of Down
House, and then only in the fine print. Get off the train from London at
Bromley South or Orpington, and the taxi driver, upon learning your
destination, would knowingly suggest that there were much finer country homes
to visit than Down House - clearly not understanding that it was Charles
Darwin that made Down House so important, not its gardens.

Arrive, pay off your I-told-you-so taxi driver, and you'd find a low budget
operation financed over the decades by the London surgeons, with only several
rooms restored to what they were like in Darwin's day, back before the place
had been turned into a girls boarding school in the early 20th century. There
were a few rooms filled with old-fashioned museum cases laden with a dozen
coats of paint, but most of the house was in sad need of repairs and
unsuitable for visitors. And this for one of the great scientists of all time,
not just one of England's greats.

Still, it was enormously inspiring to anyone who understood the
intellectual triumph of Charles Darwin, this chance to see where he had
thought it all through - his study with his microscope, his chair by the
living room fireplace, and his "sand walk" out back, where he went
for three walks a day to digest his thoughts. Often, one supposes, Darwin
sloughed through the fine English rain, likely blowing in from the west after
forming above the warm Gulf Stream.

Most people who think a little about evolution are wedded to the basic idea
of gradual improvements in efficiency - and not much concerned with the
origins of what was later improved (it was just "mutations"). Yet it
was Darwin himself (a point omitted from even the modernized science exhibits
at Down House) who first cautioned readers about getting fixated on
efficiency, and who - at the same time - offered a route for invention. He
noted that changes in function could be "so important," that an
anatomical structure improved for one function could, in passing, serve some
other function that utilized the same anatomical feature. (Darwin's example
was the fish's swim bladder serving as a primitive lung.) Novelties come from
those nascent secondary uses, not from a bolt out of the blue, as a cosmic ray
mutates a gene.

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN DOWN HOUSE since the reopening in 1998, there's a lot
more to see, thanks to much fund-raising by the British Museum. It is
currently operated by English Heritage, which issues timed tickets (phone
ahead) and provides audio wands to guide you through the rooms.

Next to Darwin's study, there's his billiard room, where cause and effect
operated on a simpler, more direct, level than it does in biology. Across the
hall is the large dining room with its bay windows; it was also the
"justice room" where Darwin served as a magistrate on occasion. The
now-rebuilt stairway to the upstairs leads you to a series of former bedrooms,
filled with modern exhibits about Darwin's science.

Darwin traveled into London for scientific meetings, but mostly he kept up
an enormous correspondence. His was something like the modern "home
office" style of working, that computers and communications are making
possible even for scientists without inherited wealth. Darwin's life shows you
another style of doing science, one without classes to teach or students to
supervise, without grant applications to write, one where piecing together the
big story operated alongside the careful dissection of barnacles, digesting it
all on yet another loop around the Sand Walk, carrying a great stick which he
struck loudly against the ground, making a rhythmical click as he walked along
with a swinging gait.

The TV series on Evolution,
all eight hours of it, originally aired on PBS in 2001. I was one of the dozen
science advisors for the series, especially the sixth program, "The
Mind's Big Bang."Science
teachers should sign up for the instructor's manual.

Travel Directions

By Train and Bus: From London's Victoria Station, buy a day
return ticket for Orpington; trains are frequent. At Orpington, walk southwest several
miles or take
the once-an-hour R8 bus from the train station, which goes directly past Down House.

If getting off at Bromley, take Bus 146 to Downe (except on Sundays). Down House is about a
five minute walk up Luxted Road from the village. A cab from Bromley was £9 each way in 1996.

Bus map (now outdated, doesn't show R8 from Orpington,
but good road map)

Driving Directions: Take the A21 toward Bromley and Orpington;
Down House is signposted at Farnborough, also on the A233
near Biggin Hill. Good maps at www.streetmap.co.uk
or www.multimap.co.uk which use Ordnance
Survey mapping; the latter also provides aerial photographs.

Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock (Cambridge University Press 1992).

"Imagine a world without Darwin. Imagine a world in which Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had not transformed our understanding of living things. What... would become baffling and puzzling..., in urgent need of explanation? The answer is: practically everything about living things...."UBS amazon.com Powell's

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London 1859).

"There is grandeur in this view of
life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has
gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being evolved." amazon.com -- try to get the Penguin or the Harvard University Press facsimile of the first edition (the others tend to be the sixth, which is cluttered with replies to contemporary critics).

Yes, ethology is another field that Charles Darwin helped to invent. Among the most readable of his books, it's alive with anecdotes, literary quotations and his own observations of his friends and children. Darwin spent a lot of time seeking out photographs of facial expressions to include in this book, and Paul Ekman (the modern expert on facial expression of emotion) makes a wonderful editor. amazon.com

"Man
with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most
debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to
the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has
penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system-
with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the
indelible stamp of his lowly origin."UBS amazon.com Powell's

Photographs and text by
William H. Calvin, a professor at the University of
Washington
and the author of a dozen popular books on
science,
who won the 2002 Phi Beta Kappa book
prize for science as literature.